Breeden, the special master on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice, said the fund received over 51,700 claims from investor victims of the Madoff Securities fraud by the close of the claim period April 30.

Claims arrived from 119 countries, reporting total unrecovered losses of more than $40 billion, according to a statement posted Tuesday on the Madoff Victim Fund website.

"Other than the Gobi desert and the polar icecaps, few places on earth seem to have escaped the scourge of this fraud," Breeden, the former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said in a statement. "This fraud was of epic, and truly global, proportions."

The Madoff Victim Fund is the official vehicle for distributing more than $4 billion in forfeited assets recovered in a bankruptcy court proceeding. The claims have not yet been reviewed to weed out ineligible, duplicate or overstated claims, which will probably be "substantial," the statement said.

"Nonetheless, it appears that at least twice as many investors as previously thought lost money in the Madoff fraud, with losses running many billions larger than previously documented," said Breeden, who about a decade ago launched Greenwich-based hedge fund firm Breeden Capital Management.

"By far the greatest number of victims report that they have not recovered anything since the fraud. For many of those individuals, the forfeiture program can be a true lifeline."

After all claims are reviewed, Breeden and the fund will recommend specific action on each claim to the Justice Department, which makes all final decisions. The timing of distributions from the fund will be determined after claims are reviewed.

The country that had the highest number of claims was the U.S. followed by Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland.

About 78 percent of claims were submitted by people reporting losses of up to $500,000. About 10 percent reported losses of between $500,000 and $1 million. The remainder reported losses of more than $1 million, the statement said.